Page 124 of Wrong Mail

A woman steps into the doorway. She’s thinner than the photographs the papers ran. There is a pale scar through one eyebrow that was not there before.

"You should have made sure the lake kept me," she says.

The man stares at her. "No. You drowned."

"Almost." She steps forward. "You can imagine my surprise when I woke up on shore." She doesn't hurry. She stops across the table from him, where he can see her. She glances at the envelope on the counter, the wrong address. "I imagine Henry Westburn got harder to wear after they pulled your car out of the lake."

He stares at her like he's seeing a ghost.

"You asked how we found you," she says. "Beyond the recent murder with the same pattern, it was you, Henry." She pauses. "I remembered something you said."

He watches her, the drug pulling his eyes half shut.

"In the café you told me the Cascade Killer was a ghost. I told you he wasn't. I said a man like that would make a mistake somewhere. That they always do." A thin smile. "Later, you told me he made mistakes early, before he got good. You couldn't help yourself telling me that. You were so proud of getting good."

His jaw works. Nothing comes.

"So I went back to the start. The break-ins, the ones before the murders. The ones that turned violent but left people alive. A few survivors remembered you saying a name. Most people wrote it off as terror in the dark." She lets it sit. "I knew the name mattered."

Henry's eyes look even heavier.

"Claire," she says. "They heard you say, 'I hate you, Claire.'"

Something goes out of his face.

"Why would you hate her? You told me Claire was your sister. Murdered, twelve years ago. The wound that made you care about the others." She shakes her head, slow. "Claire wasn't your sister, was she, Henry? She was the one who left. An ex-fiancée. And your first victim. Her, and the man she chose to marry instead of you."

He has stopped trying to stand.

“I found her,” Mallory says. “Claire Doyle, born Claire Lane. And then I found where you’d gone, because you did the one thing you could never stop doing. You went back to her.”

She glances at the walls around them, the small clean house.

"This was her father's house. Her childhood home. After he died, the listing went through one of your agencies. Different name on the door, same chain behind it. The same chain that handled Eleanor's. You could change your name, Henry. You could change your town. But you never changed the trail."

Her voice stays level.

"You knew the cops wouldn't look. They didn't the first time. You never thought I'd look. You thought I was at the bottom of a lake."

He doesn't deny it.

She picks up the envelope and taps it against the air, then sets it back down.

"A simple mistake, right?" she says softly. "We all make them."

His hands are on the table now. "Where," he says. The word drags. "Where have you been? All these months."

"That's the thing about a crash like that," she says. "Memory can disappear. Whole stretches of it. The doctors even have a name for it." Her voice stays flat. "So if anyone ever asks where I've been these last few months, I couldn't tell them even if I tried."

He understands then. All of it.

For one terrifying second, panic overpowers the drug.

He comes up out of the chair with a guttural, frantic noise. The table between us is no barrier at all. He throws himself across it and catches me before I can get clear. His weight drives us both hard into the counter, driving the air out of my lungs. My cup goes off the table and shatters. All I see is venom in his eyes as he uses his weight to slam me back. My head bounces off the kitchen cabinet, and the room flashes blindingly white. His hands are thick and hot around my neck, squeezing with a desperation that ignores the sedative in his veins.

I gag, my fingernails digging uselessly into his wrists. For three horrifying seconds, I understand how badly we underestimated him.

Then Mallory hits him.